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On the post-9/11 Muslim American experience and the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy.

by ROSEMARY R. CORBETT

Military and civilian personnel attend a Muslim prayer service at the Washington Navy Yard Chapel, Washington, D.C., 2010. Public domain.

In December 2009, Feisal Abdul Rauf, a prominent imam, Sufi shaykh, and the internationally recognized leader of the Cordoba Initiative, announced plans to open Cordoba House, a thirteen-story Islamic community center in Manhattan. The proposed center was to be built on a location two blocks from the World Trade Center site. Though designed to educate Americans about the truths Islam shares with other faiths and to exemplify “moderate Islam”—something Rauf had spent nearly a decade promoting—the proposed center was quickly embroiled in debate that eventually became known as the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy.

After 9/11 both local leaders and international elites had widely praised Rauf’s core message, delivered at his mosque, in his public appearances, and in his 2004 book, What’s Right with Islam. That message emphasizes Islam’s place within an ethical tradition originating with Abraham (the biblical patriarch common to Judaism and Christianity). Further, it holds that of all the governments in the world, American liberal democracy best embodies this ethic in social form. Because US multiculturalism, pluralism, and “democratic capitalism” are expressions of the “Abrahamic” ethic, Rauf argues, US laws and institutions comply with Islamic law (shari‘ah). Consequently, non-Muslim American can accept Muslims as Abrahamic siblings, while Muslim Americans can promote American liberal values and social systems worldwide.

Because US multiculturalism, pluralism, and “democratic capitalism” are expressions of the “Abrahamic” ethic, Rauf argues, US laws and institutions comply with Islamic law (shari‘ah).

This unconventional election year underscores the merit of the third-party option.

by NIKOLAI G. WENZEL

A "Don't Tread On Me" flag at a rally in 2010. Photo by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

With the advent of two unpopular front-runners and the rise of third-party candidate Gary Johnson, libertarianism has factored more prominently in this presidential election than in any other cycle in recent memory. Given the nature of voters’ pronounced concerns over the economy and the credibility and efficiency of the federal government, this is not surprising. Libertarianism is not just an alternative to two unpalatable mainstream parties. Instead of tinkering with details, libertarianism squarely addresses the shortcomings of politics as usual, while also offering an opportunity to reflect on first principles and the proper role of government.

Indeed, libertarianism is not (just) about being left alone, and in the context of the 2016 election cycle it is not (just) an alternative to a tired insider or an erratic outsider.

Indeed, libertarianism is not (just) about being left alone, and in the context of the 2016 election cycle it is not (just) an alternative to a tired insider or an erratic outsider. Rather, libertarianism offers a principled approach to political life. At its core lies the “non-aggression principle,” which rejects the initiation of force against others. Based on this principle, government is limited to the protection of individual rights, and leaves the rest to markets and civil society. If the government attempts to do anything beyond protecting rights, it will—by definition—violate the rights of some to benefit others.

The conservative movement, which is constituted by a dynamic tension between libertarians, traditionalist conservatives and neoconservatives, now faces the real threat of dissolution. Surprisingly, the cause of this threat does not come from within the movement, but from without. It is the result of an idiosyncratic version of populism called “Trumpism.” A toxic mix of reality show romanticism, resentment, cynicism and paranoia, Trumpism has deeply divided the conservative movement along a fault line that cuts across all three of its traditional divisions. Yet as George Nash points out in a recent issue of the New Criterion, “Trumpist Populism is defiantly challenging the fundamental tenets and perspectives of every component of the post-1945 conservative coalition.” Whether one’s primary concern is free trade, traditional marriage and the family, the protection of unborn children, or a robust foreign policy, one will not find much to cheer about in Trumpism. What is a conservative to do?

American conservatism is not identical to Republican Party politics, and it is in deep conflict with Trumpism.

It is important to understand that American conservatism is not synonymous with the conservative political movement. American conservatism is a public philosophy, a form of classical liberalism rooted in the principles of the American founding. Conservatives believe that those principles, furnished by the careful equilibrium of liberty, reason, and tradition, provide for human flourishing better than any competing public philosophy. American conservatism, therefore, is not identical to Republican Party politics, and it is in deep conflict with Trumpism.

During the 2016 presidential election a great deal of attention has been paid to a single question: How should Donald Trump behave?

Even as Trump occasionally acted like a conventional candidate he also continued to flout proprieties.

From the first days of the campaign through much of the primary season, Trump appeared to specialize in defying conventional electoral etiquette. He said many inappropriate things. He called Mexican immigrants rapists, pointedly questioned the intelligence of one of his opponents, and condemned the esteemed veteran John McCain for having been a prisoner of war. Trump also mocked a reporter with disabilities, and he insinuated that the tough questioning he received at a debate occurred because one of the moderators was menstruating.

The outrageous comments and inflammatory insults were, as former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski frequently observed, a result of simply letting Trump be Trump. Trump was his own man. He listened only to his gut, not to pollsters and consultants.

Trump’s authenticity won enthusiastic praise from core supporters. Yet as the prospect of Trump winning the Republican nomination became more certain, pressure mounted on Trump to change his ways. Lewandowski was pushed aside by a new campaign manager, Paul Manafort, a seasoned political professional who promised to pivot Trump toward a more conventionally presidential public style. “You can’t change somebody’s character,” Manafort observed shortly after joining the Trump campaign. “But you can change the way somebody presents themselves.”

There is a striking symmetry between the foreign policy agendas of George W. Bush and Barack Obama in the Middle East: they produced similar results in opposite ways—military aggression in Bush’s case and denial of assistance in Obama’s. The symmetry does not stop at the devastation of both the countries affected, namely Iraq and Syria. It also concerns one of the dreadful consequences of this devastation: whereas the Bush-run US invasion of Iraq created the conditions that led to the emergence of the “Islamic State of Iraq” (ISI) that al-Qaida proclaimed in 2006, as well as to the expansion of the parent organization across the Arab region, the Obama-adjudicated denial of crucial support to the Syrian opposition created the conditions that allowed the ISI to develop in Syria and mutate into ISIS in 2013. This was followed the year after by the announcement of the “Islamic State” tout court as a successful franchise, opening branches in its turn all over the Arab region and way beyond.

Moderate factions were swiftly eclipsed by more radical elements that were in turn aided, directly or indirectly, by other states.

Robert Ford, who resigned from his position as US ambassador to Syria in February 2014 due to his disagreement with Barack Obama’s Syrian policy, very clearly attributed responsibility for this disastrous course of events to the US president. In an interview on PBS Newshour a few months after his resignation, he even issued a premonitory warning against future attacks on US soil, as was to happen with the ISIS-inspired shootings in San Bernardino and Orlando. Ford maintained that the US was too reticent in lending assistance to the moderate forces in the Syrian opposition who have, he says, “been fighting constantly with arms tied behind their backs, because they don’t have the same resources that either Assad does or the al-Qaida groups in Syria do” and who in Ford’s estimation “frankly, we have much in common with.”

On July 15, 2016, a coup attempt shook Turkey and though it failed, it left us with many questions. While the details of how the coup was attempted and why it failed remain unclear, first indications suggest that the coup was initiated and orchestrated by a clandestine network within the army and perhaps other state institutions (including the judiciary, intelligence, and police forces). We do not know with certainty how this network was organized and how it operated, but what we do know is that the spiritual leader of this network is Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim cleric, who has been in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999. Though he and his advocates deny any accusations of his involvement, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems convinced of his guilt and intent on rooting out his network in Turkey.

Until recently, Erdogan and Gülen (and his followers) were political allies in total accord with one another.

Just a few years ago, such an accusation would have been unthinkable—until recently, Erdogan and Gülen (and his followers) were political allies in total accord with one another. Gülen, a religious and political figure and writer, is the founder of the Gülen movement, which was propelled, in part, by the rise of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party in the early millennium. A Cold War man, Gülen became a popular preacher during the anti-communist struggle in Turkey in the 1970s (likely sponsored by American intelligence). From the early 1980s on he and his followers, the Gülenists, built an international network of businessmen, teachers, journalists, intellectuals, and bureaucrats, some of whom graduated from the schools that this network established in Turkey.

Modern politics—whether left or right—has a vexed relationship with the migrant … and the citizen.

by GREGORY FELDMAN

"Odysseus and Polyphemus" by Arnold Böcklin (1896).

It seems odd that frustration with global migration and global frustration with mass democracy could signify opposite sides of the same coin. Yet, these two antipathies find their condition of possibility under the banner of modern political philosophy, which no longer inspires new ideas for political action.

On one side, modernity’s vexed relationship with the migrant requires a dogged belief that all people are categorically the same. The assumption of sameness underpins traditional politics across the spectrum and positions one’s politics toward the migrant according to the category invoked: nationalism (all citizens are the same; all migrants different from us); socialists (all workers are the same; all migrants are exploited like us); and liberals (all humans are the same; we must save the migrants). The issue is not whether the ideology holds a hostile or sympathetic stance toward the “migrant.” Rather, none of these ideologies holds a place where a migrant speaks for him/herself.

On Muslim youth growing up on the front lines of nationalist politics in Denmark.

by REVA JAFFE-WALTER

Refugee children from Syria at a clinic in northern Jordan. Photo by the UK Department for International Development. CC BY 2.0 via Wikipedia.

In 1943, when other European governments watched while Jews in their country were rounded up and deported to concentration camps, the Danish organized a nation-wide effort in which Danish fisherman carried close to 8,000 Jews across the Oresund sea to safety in nearby Sweden. Similarly, in 1983 when refugees were fleeing the Iran/Iraq war and violence in Palestine, Denmark welcomed them and led Europe in having the most generous humanitarian refugee policies offering the right to asylum, full legal rights and the same social benefits as Danish citizens.

Today, in stark contrast, Denmark has some of the most restrictive immigration and refugee policies in Europe. These policies reflect a dramatic shift from a posture of humanitarian outreach and compassion towards refugees to one focused on the increased restriction and policing of migrants and immigrants. Danish police patrol the border and the bridge between Sweden and Denmark to prevent Syrian refugees from entering. New laws emerge to deter migrants from seeking refuge in Denmark—such as the passage of a national law allowing the government to seize the personal assets of those applying for refugee status. Other laws, meanwhile, target Muslims already living in Denmark—including local mandates targeting school-age children that require that pork be served in elementary school lunch programs.

Denmark has some of the most restrictive immigration and refugee policies in Europe.

Last Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, a case concerning the constitutionality of Texas's controversial 2013 abortion regulations. While the case does not stand to overrule Roe v. Wade and make abortion potentially illegal, it does contest the means and ends of the incremental and indirect fight against abortion. It could make abortion functionally inaccessible in large swaths of the country, furthering the disparities in state-by-state access that have been rapidly growing in recent years and encouraging the anti-abortion movement to increase its efforts. For this, it is the most important abortion case to be heard by the Court since the early 1990s—even before Justice Antonin Scalia's recent passing.

It is the most important abortion case to be heard by the Court since the early 1990s—even before Justice Antonin Scalia's recent passing.

Much of the discussion regarding the Texas abortion laws has focused on the clinics that these regulations have, and still could, force to close and the resulting distances that women in parts of the state will have to travel in order to access abortion. These closures are the result of increasing the costs of clinic operation brought on by a class of laws often called Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, or TRAP laws, which create physical specifications for clinics as well as staffing and licensing requirements. The 2013 Texas state law at issue in this case mandates that abortion clinics meet surgical center standards and that doctors who perform abortions have admitting privileges at hospitals within 30 miles of the clinic. It also bans abortion at 20 weeks after fertilization.

Last week’s renewed debate between President Barack Obama and Republicans in the Senate, reminds us how murky and poorly defined the goals and strategies of the so-called war on terror remain as it enters its fifteenth year. Nowhere is this ambiguity more apparent than in Afghanistan, the place where most of the Guantanamo detainees were first apprehended.

Beginning in 2006, I spent a year and a half working with a small group of potters in a picturesque town in the mountains north of Kabul. Even while the insurgency spread in the south and the east of the country, the town, which had been leveled by the Taliban, remained staunchly in favor of the international presence. Over the course of the next nine years, however, corrupt elections, an ineffective government and a sense that a small group of former warlords had largely taken over all the key resources, led to the growing sense that the international intervention had failed to fulfill its initial promises. Returning last spring, I was stopped in the grape fields below town by a roadblock set up by the Afghan Army. The soldiers lounging on their armored personnel carriers, gifts from the US Department of Defense, said that there was an ongoing operation in the villages above, to clear it of the Taliban.

The recent news coming out of Afghanistan has not been good. The UN recently reported that 2015 had the highest number of civilian casualties since they began tracking the number.

"Robert Clive and Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey, 1757" by Francis Hayman. Public domainvia Wikipedia.

Like many postcolonial states, India—the largest country ever colonized—has dealt with an immense amount of ethnic violence in contemporary times. The 2002 Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat, which left thousands dead,are only one of the most recent examples. In seeking to explain these conflicts, many Indians have pointed to the negative legacy of British colonialism. “The Hindu–Muslim problem is a gift of the English,” Bal Thackeray, the Shiv Sena leader, once bluntly put it; “It was they who took steps to divide Hindu and Muslim, Hindu and Sikh…They got maximum success dividing the Hindus and Muslims. For them, communal riots were games to be relished.” When I arrived in India in 2010 to study ethnic violence, a local priest offered a similar view: “All the conflict these days is because of the Britishers.”

How can we be sure that widespread ethnic violence did not already exist prior to British rule?

But this is a rather difficult thing to prove. For instance, how can we be sure that widespread ethnic violence did not already exist prior to British rule? The earliest recorded Hindu-Muslim riot in India dates back to the south Indian town of Mangalore in the 14th century, some 300 years before any British official set foot on the subcontinent. A second vexing problem is determining whether or not colonialism simply coexisted with the true factors that created violence. For instance, the increase in Hindu-Muslim violence in the 19th century that was blamed on British rule coincided with the rise of revivalist Hindu and Islamic religious movements. Suddenly, the links between colonialism and ethnic violence are not so clear.

One way to isolate the effects of colonialism on Indian ethnic violence is to take advantage of a unique feature of British rule on the subcontinent: colonial administrators only governed three-fourths of the population of India. The other one-fourth (in 1901, more than 60 million people) lived in territories called “princely states” that remained under the control of largely autonomous native kings. With the princely states, history has furnished us with something like a “control group” to help us answer the present question: Was it British colonialism that fostered ethnic violence in India, or are other more intrinsic factors also to blame?

What the arrest of 5 Chinese booksellers reveals about the sexual politics of China.

by ELANAH URETSKY

The 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. After this 2012 meeting, an unprecedented anti-corruption campaign, spearheaded by President Xi Jinping, commenced to root out abuse of power and other excesses in the Chinese government. Public domain via Wikipedia.

In January of 1998 news leaked that President Bill Clinton had engaged in ‘improper’ relations with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. People around the country debated whether a man with such moral character was fit to run the country. This carried over into Congressional hearings and Clinton eventually became the second president to be impeached, charged with perjury and obstruction of justice. He was later acquitted in the Senate, served out the rest of his term in the White House and went on to become a popular former president known for doing good around the world.

Now imagine the same scenario in China of a president having an affair with a woman outside his marriage, news being leaked to the media, and popular debates ensuing about his ability to rule the country. Having a hard time with that image? That’s probably because the Chinese government would never allow such a scenario to develop. Surely the president may have an affair but the government will go to any length, as we are now witnessing, to prevent the news from being leaked.

The individual in China is still expected, first and foremost, to be loyal to the state with expectations for representatives of the government and the Party to serve as moral role models.

Last fall five men connected with Hong Kong publisher, Mighty Current, and their affiliated bookstore, Causeway Bay Books, went missing—all are now confirmed to be in police detention in China. The publishing house, which is known for releasing books critical of the Chinese government, is thought to have been working on a tell-all book that would reveal sensitive information about Xi Jinping’s love life before he became president. The Chinese government has gone to great lengths to cover up any allegations that could be revealed in the book—crossing over sovereign territory into Hong Kong and Thailand to abduct these men, two of whom now hold citizenship with European countries, and clandestinely bringing them back to China. Sure, Clinton tried to cover up his relationship with Lewinsky—he knew, after all, that admitting to it would raise eyebrows and damage his political career. But as far as we know, he never committed a crime, impinged upon the rights of individuals, or disregarded international norms to cover up or erase his indiscretion. The stakes were also a lot lower for Clinton—despite social and personal fallout, ultimately he retained his role as president. Xi Jinping or any Chinese leader, on the other hand, would certainly face the end of their career, and maybe more, upon the exposure of an extramarital affair.

How the 1956 massacre has shaped the Palestinian struggle for civil rights.

by TAMIR SOREK

Memorial on the mosque of Kafr Qasim marking the October 29, 1956 massacre. Public domain.

Kafr Qasim is an Arab village in territory that was annexed by Israel following the 1949 Israeli-Jordanian armistice agreement, and was under strict military rule until 1966. Fifty-nine years ago today, on October 29th, 1956, a group of peasants from Kafr Qasim returned to the village from their fields, unaware that their village was under curfew. Forty-seven of them were executed by the Israeli Border Patrol troops, in a massacre that would become a formative political myth for the Palestinian citizens of Israel. For the next two decades the anniversary of the massacre would be the most important date on their political calendar.

What shaped the memory of the Kafr Qasim massacre as an exceptional case was the political status of the victims as Israeli citizens.

The emergence of Kafr Qasim as a major political myth is not as self-evident as it appears to be, because during the same years Israel killed thousands of other Palestinians whose deaths remained outside of the canonic political memory. What shaped the memory of the Kafr Qasim massacre as an exceptional case was the political status of the victims as Israeli citizens.

In 1956 the Green Line was still in the process of becoming a socio-political border and the choice of Arab leaders in Israel to turn the event into a formative, watershed moment in the state’s political development reflected an emerging outlook, according to which it is possible to turn the nominal citizenship of the Palestinians in Israel into a tangible set of civil rights. It was exactly because the massacre in Kafr Qasim undermined this outlook by targeting Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, that it became necessary to make it a symbol of civil struggle. Paradoxically, the massacre became a milestone in the construction of Israeli civic consciousness among the Palestinians in Israel.

Why does Foucault—an avowed anti-humanist—turn to “rights” in his later works?

by BEN GOLDER

Former US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt with the English version of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, November 1949. Public domain.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in Paris on December 10, 1948. The result of two years of drafting by a committee of the Commission on Human Rights—whose famous chair was Eleanor Roosevelt—the text of the Declaration itself stands as an enduring testament to the global and supposedly universal appeal of these (newly declared) human rights norms. After all, the Commission had been chosen to be broadly representative of the world’s diverse cultures and civilizations. Roosevelt was joined on the committee by René Cassin of France, Charles Malik of Lebanon, Peng Chung Chang of China and John Humphrey of Canada. Human rights today are admitted by their defenders and detractors to be the ‘lingua franca’ of global politics. They are the preeminent universalist discourse of our time, dissolving regional and religious differences in the universalist and morally appealing argot of human rights—and the Declaration is the Ur-Text of this universalism.

Are human rights really universal? Or are they merely the narrow inheritance of the Western Enlightenment or European modernity?

The Declaration concerns the “inherent dignity and … the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” and it addresses itself to “everyone.” Human rights are not the rights of the citizen; they are not civil rights or civil liberties. They do not depend on one’s gender or one’s race, one’s creed or one’s class: they are the rights of the human as such. (As an aside, if you pick up a textbook on human rights almost at random, and open it to the first page, you will most likely encounter some variant on the following beguiling sentence: Human rights are the rights we have simply because we are human beings). Of course, there has been an almost interminable debate in human rights circles about the extent to which actually-existing human rights documents capture this universalist ambition. Are human rights really universal? Or are they merely the narrow inheritance of the Western Enlightenment or European modernity? Do they reflect ‘Asian Values’? Or Islamic values? Can they be derived from Confucianism or Ubuntu as readily as they can from the works of Locke or of Kant?

The committee announcement’s emphasis on the peaceful dialogue and mediation led by the Quartet obscures much of what actually transpired in Tunisia.

There is much to applaud about this award. It highlights that the Arab popular uprisings of 2011 were not for naught. There is a social base and a deep desire for democracy in at least some Arab countries. The future of Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, whose uprisings followed Tunisia’s in 2011, looks dismal today. But popular movements for democracy and social justice in the Arab world are no longer simply a utopian hope.

Nonetheless, the committee announcement’s emphasis on the peaceful dialogue and mediation led by the Quartet obscures much of what actually transpired in Tunisia.

In October 2011, nine months after the ouster of former president Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, the Islamist Ennahda won a plurality of the seats in the democratically elected National Constituent Assembly. The assembly’s task was to draft a constitution and form an interim government to assume executive power. Ennahda led the interim government in partnership with the much smaller social democratic Ettakattol and the Congress for the Republic, whose political orientation is a vague blend of human rights advocacy with an Islamic sensibility and a dash of populism.

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